June 13th, 1888 - Magdalena's on Diagon Alley

How long has this been goin' on?
You've been actin' so shady
I've been feelin' it lately, baby
-Charlie Puth

Maggie had been busy since the grand opening. Not to mention, things had been awkward with Lorcan since that first night. And that kiss. She hadn't forgotten it. If anything, it was one of the only things that she thought of beyond the happenings at the bakery. It haunted her almost nightly but the night had crashed all around them that night and she'd avoided it as best as she could. It was easier to throw herself into her work, heading down into the bakery early in the morning to get things started before Lorcan was even up and then remained there late into the night. It was working. Sort of.

But then she'd received a letter from her mother. Some mysterious fog had started spreading and it had hit Wellingtonshire. There was talk of it spreading further and she wanted to know if Cane could come and stay with her at the new shop over the summer to be away from it. Maggie had been hesitant at first but she still hadn't managed to hire someone else to help work in the shop so his help could certainly be used. She'd quickly penned back a letter to her mother to say he was welcome to come. Then it had dawned on her that they only had two bedrooms. She couldn't very well make her little brother share a room with Lorcan, could she? And it would be even more awkward to have him share a room with her.

Damn. She'd asked Burt to take over the front that afternoon and had headed back upstairs to the apartments and gone straight into Lorcan's room. She'd have to tidy his room up and move his things into her room. It was the only feasible option she had. They'd have to share a room for the time being. It was only a summer after all. She could handle it. But amidst her tidying up, she came across a handful of letters with very obvious feminine handwriting. She made the mistake of sitting on the edge of his bed to glance through them. She could hardly believe what she was reading.

Anger flared up almost instantly along with pain. Pain that caused her eyes to burn with tears but she refused to cry over him. She had thwarted his advances after all, right? She was surely the one to blame but she could hardly believe that he had actually sent an ad into that awful magazine as a result! She'd been slandered by them. He had, too! She finished what she was doing and gathered up the letters and threw them onto the kitchen table before making a quick trip downstairs to tell Burt he could leave for the day and putting a closed sign on the shop doors and turning the lights out.

When it was all done, she made her way back up to the kitchen and sat down at the kitchen table to wait.

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   Edric Umbridge

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Lorcan was whistling cheerfully enough as he came home. Not because he was glad to come home, especially. Not that the rooms above the bakery had ever exactly sunk in as home.

It was Maggie's place: Maggie's bakery, Maggie's home. Lorcan had - well, he had left every home he'd known, he realised, seeking greener pastures here and greener pastures there; Merlin, to think he had used to feel stifled with the family in Ireland...

Still, he had always looked on the bright side, before. And today had been fine. Work had been fine. Living here was fine. Maggie was - fine. They may be married in everyone's minds but theirs, but what did it matter? He could get on with his life regardless.

He came up the stairs, on his way to his room to wash up from work but catching a flicker of light from the kitchen and swinging into the room to see if there was any food about to sneak before he had a proper supper. Maggie was sitting at the table, some pieces of parchment in front of her; Lorcan murmured a greeting but had mostly ignored her, not noticing anything expressly wrong as he crossed the room to pull the window closed. The fog may have been far off in Hogsmeade and the weather may have been warm today, but right now, there was a definite chill in the air. "Well, how was your day?" He asked perfunctorily, casting a brief look over his shoulder at her.  

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Maggie heard him well before he came into view. She felt the anger rise as the sound of him, her glare focusing directly on him even as he stepped into the kitchen. The mumbled greeting didn't do any good of calming her in the slightest. If anything, she felt her anger grow even further. She continued to watch him as he walked further into the kitchen. Clearly, he couldn't be that daft, could he? But apparently, he was as he looked over his shoulder back to her and asked the question.

"It started off well enough," she answered, the iciness evident in her tone as well as her gaze, "Got a letter from my mum asking if Cane could stay with us until the summer cleared up." She paused, still watching him to see if he'd show any sort of reaction to what she was saying. He might not initially but he would when she'd finished, surely.

"I told her that was fine but realized we've only the two bedrooms and I didn't think making my little brother share a room with me or my husband was the thing to do," she continued on, grabbing the letters and sticking them out into his direction, "So I tidied your room and moved your things to mine. Then I found these."

If looks could kill, Lorcan would have been dead. As it was, they couldn't and she wasn't about to lose everything she'd fought and worked for by murdering him with her bare hands. But dammit the thought was tempting because she was so damned hurt by what she'd read in the letters.

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Turning around to look at her properly, Lorcan leant himself against the windowsill still some distance from her, and gleaned enough from her tone and expression to tell that she was in a bad mood.

Wonderful.

She was holding some letters, but then her story had started with a letter, so Lorcan made nothing of it. Of her mother’s request, he only shrugged, as if to say it didn’t matter to him either way. Maggie’s house, after all. Maggie’s family came first. She’d have agreed no matter what he thought.

And she had. Lorcan didn’t even bother feigning surprise. He did raise an eyebrow at the news that she’d been in his bedroom, moving his things about. (Given they had stuck quite resolutely to their own ends of the hallway for the last month, this did surprise him.) “What a martyr,” he interjected, at her decision to spare her brother and have them share a room instead; Lorcan suspected, briefly, that her bad mood must be about that.

But then he took a closer look at the letters she was brandishing, leaning forwards a little from his chosen position. He didn’t need to take them from her to peg what they were.

He wasn’t surprised she’d found them. They hadn’t been hidden. Not that he’d been expecting her to look. He hadn’t been especially furtive, sending the owls, either, but then again, he hadn’t expected her to care. So, as yet, he hadn’t the faintest idea why she looked so livid.

“And?” Lorcan said.

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Oh he was perhaps the most infuriating person Maggie knew, had ever known. The way he was so blase with what she was saying, acting as if it was all no big deal. It was awful. He was awful. And what was worse, was she felt like crying. She hated that perhaps more than anything else. Simply put, she wanted to scream in his face but she couldn't quite find the strength to do so.

"And? And don't you think that you could perhaps a little more compassion?" she asked, glaring at him as she threw the letters away from her as if they'd been burning her fingertips holding them, "Or since I ruined your gallivanting about by asking you to marry me the best way to get back at me is by putting in some ad to that awful magazine that has already dragged our names through the mud?" She really didn't understand why he had gone that route. An affair was one thing but doing something so public, or something that could become so public... It was like a slap to the face.

Sighing, she rubbed at her temples and did everything she could to fight the tears she felt threatening to fall. "If you want to have an affair, fine," she said, unable to even look at him, "It's understandable considering the.. the circumstances. But the least you could do is do so privately." Was that really too much to ask? Even if the very idea was enough to nearly break her in two.

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   Flora Mulciber

Lorcan was confused. What did compassion have to do with it?

And who had said anything about getting back at her? Obviously, it had nothing to do with her, because she had bloody well proven she wanted nothing to do with him, and this was what Lorcan was left with. He hadn't even sent in an ad to that magazine, whom he supposed he should also thank for making sure the whole world knew that he'd eloped, which probably meant finding someone who'd sleep with him as a married man was going to be that much harder anyway.

And she had the gall to be mad at him, when she'd gotten everything she wanted? Lorcan knew he'd suggested the whole damned thing, so he had brought this all upon himself, had ignored the warnings and hadn't thought, but... well. He'd helped her out, regardless, so really she ought to have more compassion about "ruining his gallivanting", hadn't she?

There was a straightforward explanation for the letters - or at least the advertisement, if not the rest of them - but he was too annoyed to answer to her when she was like this. Instead, he folded his arms, and kept his distance and his cool, making the words as cuttingly casual, careless, as he could. "You really think I think writing in to Witch Weekly would be the easiest way to have an affair?" Lorcan asked her, raising an eyebrow almost incredulously. (The more moral young ladies about would be driven away by knowledge of the elopement, but Lorcan was fully aware there existed girls who were far less scrupulous, and he was sure he had the ability to seek them out if he wanted.)  

Besides, the letters - which he hadn't started, which had just fallen into his lap! - were still private, whatever she said. He wasn't totally stupid. Maggie's reputation had suffered plenty from the choice she'd made, and Lorcan had never intended to cause her more on that front. The affair wouldn't hurt her, because she wasn't interested in him; and she'd told him it would be this way from the first, and even now she saw it was understandable. (The fact that she recognised this directly somehow didn't offer Lorcan the triumphant feeling he'd expected.)

"You think I'm a real idiot, don't you?" Lorcan scoffed. Better to sound callous than offended, and better to go on the offensive in return, because why should he be the one defending himself? A sham this marriage might be, but surely they had still been supposed to be equals, somehow? What gave her the right to dictate their lives down to the letter, or to dig around through his room while he wasn't home? "Did you see my name anywhere in those, while you were going through my things?"

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Maggie stared at him in wide eyed shock as she waved the letters in the air as if they were proof enough, an answer to his question of writing into the magazine. Clearly he had, or someone had done it for him otherwise the damned letters wouldn't be there! They wouldn't be having the fight if it hadn't happened! And even he hadn't been the one to send the ad in, he'd still thought to respond to them. That was a slight enough in itself! One she should be ignoring, truth be told, considering she'd told him they were to be nothing more. Now she was beginning to wonder if any of it would be worth it in the end.

"What else am I supposed to think, Lorcan?" she asked, still glaring but her tone holding less of a bite and showing more of an exhaustion. The tension that had been between them since the first night was exhausting. Walking around on glass and avoiding him was just exhausting. Everything. All of it. She was exhausted and she didn't want to be. It wasn't even a good exhaustion. She was miserable when she should have been happy and living her dream. She'd gotten her dream but there was no happily ever after in the slightest.

A sigh left her as she shook her head. She didn't want to fight with him, she really didn't. "No," she said softly, a more defeated tone coming into the mix as she finally look away from him and simply looked to the ground before her face fell into her hands. She wasn't crying despite wanting to.

"This is all just one bloody fucking mess," she mumbled, more to herself than anything but damn she didn't know what to even say or do anymore.

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She might have had a point with her first question, which Lorcan took as rhetorical in the absence of having a good retort. The only words coming to mind for that were well, clearly you just shouldn't think about it, since you're so good at not thinking about me usually, but - he swallowed those. That made it sound like he needed her to.

Well, he didn't. She didn't need to spare him a thought if she didn't want to, but that didn't grant her the right to be all high-and-mighty, all holier-than-thou now, when he was doing something else she didn't like. Somehow he'd already managed to exasperate her, Lorcan observed, watching as she crumpled into herself, like she was tired, like she was upset, like she was going to cry.

And that wasn't fucking fair, to play him like that. Lorcan forced himself to shove down the stirring sympathies and the stupid, stupid desire to cradle her in his arms and tell her he was sorry and he had been an idiot and never meant to make her miserable.

In the absence of sympathy - of compassion - the flames of outrage spit up stronger, more bitterly. Lorcan leapt on her last mumbled comment, and stalked over to snatch the stack of letters from her hand. "Mess, you said? What mess?" He screwed up one of the lonely hearts letters with a crunch of his fist, staring her down. Nothing was going to come of them, anyway; it had all been a ploy to show him the other options he couldn't have even if he wanted them now, so. What did it matter. "There, I've fixed the mess, how about that?" He tossed the crumpled letter away, watching as it bounced off a table leg in feigned nonchalance. "Nothing's going to happen there anyway. No one will ever know. So now everything's perfect again, right? You're happy now?"

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Maggie's head came up quickly as she felt him snatch the letters from his fingers. Tears hadn't fallen but her eyes were wide and glassy as she looked up to him, the shock evident when she looked to him. He stared her down and her eyes only widened as she watched him crinkle up one of the letters in his hand. She didn't have an answer but it didn't seem as if he was really looking for one. He was pissed, she could see that. It only inflamed her own anger. But then he threw the crumbled up ball of parchment.

She flinched at that as she saw his hand go up in the process to throw it. A brief glimmer of fear crossed over her face even if the ball never came close to her. In that moment, she realized she was a bit afraid of him. A part of her wondered if he'd actually have struck out at her. It was terrifying, but fear could make people act in strange ways.

Standing up, she shook her head and shoved him slightly but there was no real force to it. "Do I look like I'm fucking happy?" she spat, her own blue eyes staring back at him in a fierce glare. She turned away from him just as quickly as she'd stood up to shove him. "Dammit, Lorcan," she started to say, shaking her head as she tried to catch her breath and tried to regain some sort of composure but it didn't seem like it was going to happen, "I don't want to fight with you. I never wanted this to be this way. I never wanted you to hate me." And that was exactly what she was feeling from him. A hatred and loathing for shackling him down from the life he'd had. His happy ending was clearly different from her own but even though she'd been the one to get the most from their marriage, she was downright miserable. And, quite frankly, she was hating every minute of it.

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At first he couldn’t work out why she’d flinched. And then he saw the flicker of fear in her face - she couldn’t possibly be afraid of him, could she? Lorcan didn’t think anyone had ever been afraid of him in his life. Not that he was often as annoyed as he was now - he was rarely angry at all - but he’d always looked at his more tempestuous cousins and thought it would funny, to be so terrifying. But seeing that look on Maggie’s face? He hated it.

This was not what he’d wanted.

She was angry in turn, too, of course, and pushed him backwards a little, though not enough to make him stumble. His hand, emptied of the letter, loosened from the fist he’d been making, most of his anger dissipating with it, though there was an undercurrent of bitterness he still couldn’t budge.

No, she didn’t look happy. “This is exactly the way you wanted it to be,” Lorcan said flatly, which he could tell was unfair, because how on earth would Maggie have predicted this of him, that he hadn’t thought any of this through, he was only going to be more trouble - more trouble to her than he was worth. (Really, Lorcan considered, perhaps she should have had an inkling.)

He knew what he was supposed to say next to her, to try and begin making up for his letters and his ingratitude and impatience and anything else he’d done that she hated him for, and that was but I don’t hate you. And he didn’t. He hated this, but the situation hadn’t tarnished how he thought of her - fondly, still fondly. And this was what she had wanted, so it wasn’t his fault if it wasn’t all she’d cracked it up to be, and he wasn’t going to apologise. “And, whatever you say, I don’t have a problem with it,” he said with a shrug, half in challenge and half in defeat - that he’d suck it up and live with it, with private affairs and staying out of her way and whatever else she wanted - “so what’s yours?”

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Maggie shook her head. "It is not," she spat, glaring at him. How could he think she wanted them to be miserable for the rest of their lives? Because that's exactly what they had been since that first night. Or at least she had been. She hated walking around on eggshells with him. Hated feeling like anything she might say or do would cause him to hate her even more than he already did. His cousin had all but accused her of trapping him into something he didn't want already. She felt that. She knew she had. It had all been a joke to start, playful banter they'd always partook in. And then it wasn't. Then it became something real and she'd ruined his life the way he'd known it. That was on her, she knew that. But she'd never wanted to make him miserable.

"You're lying," she said, calling him out on his not having a problem with it. She may have been a naive innocent to think any of this would have turned out alright but she wasn't stupid. But.. she didn't know how to respond to his question. She didn't have an answer for it. She didn't know what her problem was, not truly. Other than the feelings that had always been there, that she'd tried to ignore. She'd thought they had just been the smitten thoughts of a little schoolgirl with a crush. Clearly it was something more. But she couldn't say that to him. Not now. Not after everything that had happened. He'd really think she was crazy then.

With a sigh, she turned away from him. "Just.. I don't know," she said as she shook her head again, "My brother will be here tomorrow. He'll be helping in the front end of the shop." She needed to get away from him before her true feelings were exposed but she wasn't sure if it'd be that easy right then.

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He only raised an eyebrow at the way she told him he was lying. She could believe what she wanted. And yeah - okay - maybe he was lying, but he doubted she'd ever understand why, so whatever.

"Well, sorry if I'm even more of a disappointment than you imagined," Lorcan said at last, bitter, as though that was the reason neither of them were happy. It was, though, a snide voice in his head told him, because Maggie wouldn't have had any problems if she had found someone gentle and kind and selfless and understanding who knew how to do a nice thing for someone without utterly fucking it up like he had this.

A lesson in not to do selfless things for the future, then.

(Maybe his motives hadn't been as selfless as he pretended. Maybe that was the problem, and he'd forgotten he was supposed to be making Maggie happy and not just selfishly inserting himself in her life like he could be her saviour or her partner or even just the convenient means to an end she'd envisioned.)

"Lucky he's coming, then," he added, having meant to forgo any feeling in his voice, but still feeling a stab of irritation that she'd just turned away without giving him a real answer, "you'll have someone you actually like around. It'll be like you never left home."

He glanced down at the Lonely Hearts letters still bunched up in his hand, half-ready to light them on fire and extinguish the evidence, but just stuffing them into his pocket instead, if only because it took less effort. (And because he could do what he liked, and Maggie couldn't stop him. And also because he was setting up Maeve with a stupid soulmate as revenge, if it was the last thing he did.)

"I'm going out." Lorcan announced curtly after that, figuring that was the easiest way to put an end to this argument: give her space, and find himself an escape, however brief.

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Maggie's jaw dropped as he apologized for being a disappointment. All she could really do was shake her head in response. He was far from a disappointment. He was so much more than that. Everything she'd dreamed of, really. But that had been ruined. She was sure he hated her. The way he looked at her now, spoke to her, it all made it more obvious. Real.

How could she ever tell him that she did care about him? Truly cared? That she didn't want to see him hurting the way he was or hating her? Would he even believe her? She doubted it. Not after all they'd been through. It broke her heart just to think of it and had her longing for things to go back to the way they were. His erratic visits to the bakery on High Street with his overly flirtatious jokes and smiles. She missed that, missed him. But.. it was too late.

Nodding at his comment of going out, she simply looked away from him to the ground and left the kitchen herself. She went to her room, soon to be their room, and set to making him as comfortable of a bed as she could manage away from her own. She just hoped it would be enough though she sincerely doubted it.

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